Fic: Along This Crooked Road - prologue (1/5)
I felt the storm, and swam until the skies were clear,
and I found a home along this crooked road.
~~All Of This Could Have Been Yours, Shooter Jennings and Heirophant
This is the myth of Earth-That-Was:
we evolved on a small planet, a blue marble in an unremarkable corner of the galaxy. Over the aeons, we thrived and grew more numerous until earth could no longer support our race. Faced with starvation as crops failed and crowded into teeming, polluted cities that sprawled across entire countries, we found ourselves in a race against the clock; to develop the technology we needed to leave our home world behind and find new worlds among the stars.
It took us a century, but we left Earth-That-Was behind and found a new galaxy, one with hundreds of systems that had dozens of planets and thousands of moons and that system became our new home. Each planet and moon was terraformed, made over in the fading memory of the world that had given us life.
All of this is a lie.
This is the real story of Earth-That-Was, how its fate came to rest on the shoulders of a pair of brothers and the desperate gamble they made, one last roll of the dice when all seemed lost:
chapter 1